More Dark Side

I'm telling this way out of sequence, not sure why. In 1984, I was divorced, living in Venice, working at the Bonaventure Hotel down town and got a call at work from a sheriff in Paris Illinois where my father lived. To this day, I do not know if the call was real or my father put the guy up to it. Anyway, he said he was with the Paris Sheriff's office and they were investigating my father for the murder of his wife. I told the guy, I was sure he did it it and I proceeded to tell him about the beatings of my mother and the obsessive tracking of her after their divorce and how she got a restraining order against him. I called back and checked him out and he was legit, but that doesn't mean my father hadn't convinced him of something. My father was an insurance claim investigator on the side and had access to personal credit records and had friends in the police force.  I talked to him once more and didn't get any information from him about what was happening. I alerted all of my siblings and mother. If he had killed once, he could decide to do the rest of us in. I spent a month watching every time I walked out my door.
When OJ got arrested, I knew. I had grown up with the creep.

The Dark Side

The last time I saw my father alive was in San Francisco in 1978. We met at a restaurant. He had tricked my mother into giving him my phone number by having someone else call and pretend to be a potential employer that was trying to find me to make me a job offer. Then he calls and wants to visit. I didn't believe he had my address. My wife, at the time, did not want to meet him, she had heard all of the stories. Nor did I want him to know where I lived. (I ain't stupid- my mother and brother had their cars fooled with and my brother had walked out one morning and found the old man sitting in his car across the street with a gun in his hand which he pointed at my brother.)

So we agreed on a time and place and I was there early and parked my motorcycle two blocks away because I didn't want him to write down my license number or the make and model of the bike.

I walked in to find him with his new wife and her brother and his wife. I told the old man that I had come to talk to him and I wasn't interested in being social. We sat at the lunch counter while the others got a table.
He says: Hello. I love you. -then hands me a piece of paper to sign. It was a document signing away my rights to the trust that my Great Uncle had left. There were blank places for my brother's and sister's signatures.
I said: I'm not signing this and they won't either. My sister won't see you and my brother has already told you to take a hike.

By signing over the trust, he could sell the holdings and walk away with a lot of money which was intended to be left to his kids (us).

I don't remember much of the rest of the conversation- it was short and I left him there and wandered around to make sure he hadn't followed me before getting my cycle. And then for the next several days I cased the street each time I walked out and looked over my shoulder a lot. (I wasn't stupid)

A response to my craziness

This is from one of the other members of the GLAWS group. I think he's got it!




imagine a dog lapping water is the best description of a paragraph, huh?  you must be considered harmless to yourself and others.  it's great they allow you such privileges as joining a writer's group.   asylums are really becoming innovative these days. 

however, i'll ignore your status and take up your manifesto.  a dog laps water - (topic}.  the dog is a big skinny mongrel with a mud-encrusted mangey coat of red fur.  he lowers his snout toward the lit-tle tricklet of water in the gutter in the street.  he sniffs its contents and finds its an acceptable sour-ce of hydration, even though its not terribly hygienic.  but he can't be discriminatory about it - he's thirsty and he's searched for water for over an hour now.  he starts sticking his tongue out into the water. he cradles each gulp in his tongue's temporary folded bowl.  the lapping increases in rapid rhythms as he fills his stomach.  - (exposition).  suddenly the dog looks up from the tricklet of water and notices an immaculately groomed snow-white poodle with a jewel-encrusted collar being led on a leash by its owner, an overdressed, overjeweled fat dowager.  the woman pauses on the sidewalk to offer some evian water she has in her purse to her pet and pours it into a plastic cup and lowers it to the sidewalk in front of the animal's snout.  the poodle sniffs the cup and then refuses the refresh-ment.  the dog and woman leave the cup of water on the sidewalk. - (antithesis).  the mongrel, his eyes having recorded the scene, leaps up from the gutter onto the sidewalk and rushes to the cup of water.  he laps up the clean water to his heart's content. - (conclusion).

is this what you mean, dan?  is my paragraph a more perfect paragraph than joyce's?  anyway,
thanks for the privilege of entering your . . . uh . . . world.  it's a lot more rarefied than mine.  talk about a thirsty dog - my consumption of literary classics is like the mongrel's lapping the tricklet of water.  i too am parched.  i too want to quench my craving for literary sustenance.  i'm going to de-mand more time for myself for reading.  i've never touched rabelais.  that's gonna change.

     - lionel rivers malone           
  
        

Tales From Camp Dan

You haven't lived until you've taken a load of bears to the museum.  I stayed home five years and besides my three in the summer, I had four or five more. You used to be able to take sketchpads and pencils to LACMA and sit on the floor and draw pictures of the art. We also had little contests. I would make up lists of things to be found in the paintings and we would have a friendly competition to find them. I never got to win. Bears are like puppies, they attract women. We were followed one day by an aging valley girl type who was very invested in what the bears could do. A couple of them were getting a little nervous by her proximity. We would retire to the grass outside for lunch and snacks. Lots of tuna and peanut butter and chips and fruit juice boxes in those days. They will stay with you for the most part, unless you make a weird issue of it and then they rebel. I learned that from the beach outings. I was sure I would lose one to the waves, but they all self-edited themselves into safety.
We saw every museum, every building, every park, and swimming pool in Los Angeles.

If You Haven't Heard

I found this song, this CD in a thrift store in LA up near Canter's on Fairfax. Willie Nelson sang on it. The singer was this photographer from Rolling Stone, who wrote all the songs. Hell of an album

Footnote to the Author's Craziness

A dog lapping water has to breathe. The breath is the antithesis. There is no value without the antithesis.

Saturday, However

Shot of me Saturday afternoon at a music party. I sang and played in front of thirty people, all of whom were better musicians than me. I thought, wow, a shot of me singing, but closer examination shows I was not playing the banjo, so I was not singing here. The young good looking girl is one of the bears. She sang really well.

True Craziness- The Author Is Driven To Confess

Today's GLAWS Writer's Group encouraged this. Please forgive me.

A perfect paragraph:

Cocklepickers.  They waded a little way in the water and, stooping, soused their bags, and lifting them again, waded out. The dog yelped running to them, reared up and pawed them, dropping on all fours, again reared up at them with mute bearish fawning. Unheeded, he kept by them as they came towards the drier sand, a rag of wolf’s tongue redpanting from his jaws. His speckled body ambled ahead of them and the loped off at a calf’s gallop. The carcass lay on his path.  He stopped, sniffed, stalked round it, brother, nosing closer, went round it, sniffing rapidly like a dog all over the dead dog’s bedraggled fell. Dogskull, dog sniff, eyes on the ground, moves to one great goal. Ah, poor dogsbody. Here lies poor dogbody’s body.
- Tatters! Out of that, you mongrel.

Page 46, Ulysses- James Joyce, Random House 1961, 4^th printing.

Joyce did not use quotation marks. The dash means it’s a line of dialog.

In old grammar books, a paragraph is defined as:

1.       A topic sentence

2.       Exposition, expanding that topic statement

3.       Antithesis,  the opposite view or argument

4.       Conclusion

Since this is fiction writing rather than expository –essay writing, we must show not tell.  So if you are interested in using this structure, then you have use it with physical symbols that will act out the same dynamic  as an expository paragraph would.

Joyce starts us off with just telling us who they are & what they are doing. “Cocklepickers”  The previous paragraph described a man & woman and the dog coming down the beach, leading the viewer, narrator to decide here what they are doing.  We are given the dynamics of the two and their dog. The two are looking for cockles; the dog is trying to engage them without success. The dog is very active, very excited, very alive. It encounters its opposite, the carcass of the dead dog, reacts to it, even gets emotional about it as Joyce sort of implies the dog’s interior monologue with the “Here lies poor  dogsbody’s body “  which could be the viewer trying to imagine what the dog is thinking or the narrator giving us the dog’s actual thought processes.  Here is the antithesis. The Conclusion is the owner of the dog telling it to get away from it, a combination of the dynamic between them and at the same time acknowledging life and death simultaneously.

If you look at the description of the dog before it finds the dead dog, all of details demonstrate how alive and active the dog is.

So we are given the tension between the two people and their dog, how it plays out with its experience of its opposite- a dead ownerless dog- and the result. All of the description is tied to the logic of the paragraph structure.

This is all combined with Joyce’s ear for the language, matching the cadence of the words with what is occurring and his willingness to play with convention and communicate with the notion that meaning is strung over the words like icing on a cake.

There are variations upon this structure.  Faulkner will use this very same structure over a page and ½ of narrative and dialog with several paragraph like separations.  There are certain passages in Hemingway where the reader creates the part of the structure that is missing because Hem could make his reader do that. This structure is all through Joyce’s books (I’ve never been able to do Finnegan’s Wake, so I can’t speak to that), all of Faulkner’s, John Gardner, early Ray Bradbury,  James Agee,  Virginia Woolf, Thoreau.  I have always meant to do more of a survey of other authors, but this understanding gave me my own style and no one really wanted to hear me talk about how I write.  The paragraph above,  I tell people who want to listen, is seamless (like Jesus’ robe) – you cannot see the logic. Joyce was the most conscious of writers in the 20^th century. He knew 7 or 8 languages, had read everything and included every nuance and every literary forbearer in Ulysses.  http://www.amazon.com/James-Joyces-Ulysses-Stuart-Gilbert/dp/0394700139 is the book to read if you want to tackle Ulysses.  You should read Homer, Dante,  & Rabelais as well.    

You can use the same structure for building structure for sections of dialog between characters.  I am asking for an overview reaction to the play, because I will be trying to apply this structure to the dialog on the second draft and detail critiquing at this point won’t help if I restructure a ½ page of dialog to meet a logic criteria.  I’ve been working this way the last 25 years- and you see where it’s gotten me.

I gave up years ago trying to convince folks this was a valid approach. An editor friend suggested that a paragraph was the amount of words that fit on her computer screen at one time.

The best description of a paragraph I’ve heard is: imagine a dog lapping water.

Bad Walks #1

I've been to Vegas several times. Once to get married, which was fun. Several times to Comdex (Computer Dealers' Exhibition) was a computer expo held in Las Vegas, Nevada, each November from 1979 to 2003) as a USC/ISI Tech Buyer. The last time was to drive my son up to the Spring High School Basketball Tournaments

where we stayed in a hotel where he spent all of his free ime studying for finals and AP exams and then we would go play with a lousy club team that lost every game.

Comdex was generally boring as all get out, because it was 10,000 computer nerds. They didn't gamble, they didn't drink, they didn't go to shows or eat out anywhere but the buffets. Wonderful time. The slots are empty, the restaurants are empty etc. So I would walk. It was one giant Disneyland

and it doesn't even have the edge of age. If they stopped tearing it down and rebuilding it, in three hundred years it might feel like Versailles, but as it is it is just plain nauseatingly boring. Like I want to walk around miniature versions of real places or feel like I'm on an Hollywood back lot- now that's real. Like I want to walk up and down long expanses of concrete that not another soul has actually walked on, see lobbies that have the feel and texture of shopping malls. Ten miles and I was done.

This was where I started, or was it where I stopped? Anyhow, I hope I don't have to go back anytime soon.

Its Midnight And I should Be In Bed

Mother of a Miners Child - Gordon Lightfoot @ Yahoo! Video

And another



He was a perfect songwriter. (Gordon Lightfoot wrote both) I need to learn "Mother of a Miner's Child" on Banjo. but then this one comes up and you remember those that you didn't sleep with, but they looked right through you and gave you shelter and would have probably loved you had you been ready to be loved, but of course we weren't. Waylon on a TV screen says it all. We were the cheap disposable idiots of our age.

Walking with Bears

W

We were afraid to take them out if we both weren't there. So in the evening she and I and the two of them would stroll around the block. There were landmarks to keep them focused and rituals. Around the first corner were apartments that opened on the sidewalk but had a little stoop with a few steps on each side and a railing. These became the kissing stairs where they could hop up and give us a kiss between the rails. (Years and years later, in a mall with one of them and both of us, a woman came over and exclaimed "The Kissing Stairs" - she had lived in the apartment.) Around the next corner there were stones to hop from one to the other. And then places where dogs lived and a little tree to climb a little further and then a family's yard with a high fence that only I could see into. I think I made up stories about what was going on beyond the fence they couldn't see over.

I came home early from work one day and discovered the Nanny walking around the block with them by herself. We decided that if she could do it, we, the parents, could certainly do it. Then came walks to the beach and hikes in the mountains later. It was a little scary to walk over to the beach and find the National Guard and their trucks at the Venice Circle (during the Rodney King Riots) We went a separate time, after the riots, when I encountered a bunch of kids running toward the police, and I turned the bears homeward to find that the beach had been closed because a fight between the police and the gangs. We used to walk over every Sunday morning for muffins and juice at a little outdoor cafe.

The Post Office and the little neighborhood video store became places of play. The video store guy finally gave us or sold us cheap his copy of Cinderella because it was one of the bears' favorites.

I learned at the park to stand back from the two of them, so I could focus my eyes to two different directions at the same time, which is not easy to learn. Friends thought I was walleyed.

Venice Neighbors #4

I got divorced in Venice, my ex took most everything worth taking including the car. I had little money, so I began wandering the back alleys of Oakwood and Venice and most of the alleys looked like this. If I found a desk or a bureau or some such that could be repaired, I'd carry it back to my empty apartment, repair it, refinish it and use it. Or I'd get stuff from Thrift stores.

When I left my little place to move in with the lady I live with now, we found the little house over on Cabrillo and negotiated where everything went. Much of my rescued furniture ended up outside, ready to be given back to the thrift stores and alleys of Venice. There was a single Mom next door, with a little girl with matching red hair that thought all this furniture was a godsend. We gave her most of it I think. We got friendly and we got to steal lemons from her lemon tree and we gave her avocados from ours.

Then it was discovered that one of my lady's friends had been the woman's therapist. And things cooled a bit.  

Venice Neighbors #3

John and his boyfriend lived two cottages down and we had a sort of a nodding acquaintance. They would walk by and ooh a bit on our new twins. John's boy friend was already showing the signs of AIDS. He borrowed tools from me occasionally, and then he was gone. John moved into the smaller house right next door to us. He became a friend and would come over for parties. He'd sit out front and stick his feet in the wading pool with me while the twins cavorted about. I recall worrying about the scrape on his foot and the exposure in the wading pool water, but I didn't say anything. The kids loved him. Once we were at a nearby park and locked our car keys in the trunk by accident and called him for help and he came and got my wife and broke into our house for the duplicate set, while I babysat two toddlers with very dirty diapers. John was the neighbor that was screaming at the gang house across the street, which got me involved trying to act as a peacemaking of sorts. He didn't care at that point, I guess. He knew he was going to die. There was little they could do for AIDS then. He worked in a restaurant in the Marina until he couldn't work any more and friends helped and his sister came and he died with a smile on his face they said. He told me once that he didn't even realize he was gay until he had fallen in love with his boy friend and he had been the only lover he had ever had. 

J  IS  FOR  JOHN  IN  OUR  HOUSE

In the August evening’s light,

The twins, with their mother, go to pick beans

From the bamboo fence

Where you had them help you

Plant, not so long ago.

 

The woman from the next house down

Joins them with hose in hand,

So the world won’t turn brown

Before the new tenant arrives.

Christopher flirts with her- the way three-year-olds flirt-

With tricks and hops

And declarations, while his sister

Holds tight the handful of beans

For tomorrow’s dinner.

 

We’re through explaining now, I think,

Why they took your things away,

And your car,

And why they came to clean.

Alexandra has learned to say,

“I miss John, Mama.”

You’ve come to say good-bye

On consecutive nights:

First to Alexandra’s dreams

And then to Christopher’s,

You, who couldn’t tell them apart,

In the beginning, when you passed our yard.

 

I was afraid for them,

When death looked at me from your eyes,

You were nothing I could fix for them,

You were as old as I and should have known better

Than to die in front of them.

 

If you’ve returned to me to say good-bye,

I might barely know,

My dreams, so walked upon,

Scarcely remain with morning.

But I do know too well where faces go

When children grow

And yours was just too early.

 

Where I'll Be

We're getting up at 5:00 am to drive like a bat out of hell to the Kern River. Spend the day and night and come back Sunday. I've done this a few times, it's great fun. Bringing two of the three bears. The first time was maybe 10 years ago. They docked at the side of the river and let those brave enough, float down a quiet spot for a quarter mile or so. Last year, they built a giant slide out of all the groups' rafts and we took turns running up and sliding down into the river.

Once we went to the Boy Scout camp up the road and stayed the night for free in exchange for doing clean-up for them. The first backpack trip was around the upper Kern years ago. Been meaning to go back for another trip one day.

Happy Laker Championship - Happy Father's Day

Venice Neighbors #2

I encountered him at midnight one night. The dogs next door were going crazy and I knew the neighbors were gone, so I went out to look. He was standing in the middle of my front yard, with my water hose in his hand, spraying the dogs across the fence with water. He said their barking was keeping him up. I ran him out and told him next time I found him in my yard I would call the police. (Actually, I had met him a week before. I was sitting on my porch reading a book on a Saturday afternoon and he was walking up and down the street trying to find the owner of a car whose alarm was honking endlessly)

The nanny told us that he had come by during the week to complain because my son was blowing a whistle and disturbing him. She had brought the kids inside to get away from him.

One Saturday my wife was out front with my son and her twin sister (who were about three or four) and there was yelling and I could hear her yelling. I stumbled out and she told me that he had just returned and was screaming at her about the whistle. She yelled back. He had gone down the alley. I followed and caught up with him and told him I didn't want him anywhere near my house and he was not to scare the kids. He laughed at me. I hit him. Pretty hard. He took off and I followed him. He went to his building which was on the opposite side of our block and there were friends of his out front. They interceded. I told him I did not want to see him near my house again.

He filed a police complaint against me. I had to appear at an arbitration hearing. I had actually had surgery the day before our encounter (a vasectomy) and I took that paperwork with me. The guy who was my age, brought his father. He claimed I had cost him pain and an enormous dental bill because his teeth and jaw were damaged by my blow. I denied hitting him.(There was one witness, but he refused to say he had seen anything- it was the neighbor that had the dogs sprayed down) I showed that I had had the operation the day before and that there was no way I could run after him and/or engage in a physical battle. The arbitrator told us to stop having arguments and that was the end of it.

One morning, I was on my bike on my way to work, which took me by the front of his building and he was out there. He started screaming, calling me a liar and some other names. I circled around and came back to the gate where he was standing. I told him to look around. Did he see another souls anywhere? When he realized he was alone, I told him I would deny hitting him a second time. He recoiled as if I had hit him.

He wasn't done, he turned a hose on a party across his own fence. I was hoping he would discover the gang house across the street and they would take care of him, but he never did.

I got home one evening and was told by a neighbor that he had been found dead in his apartment, apparently a drug overdose or something, maybe an heart attack. The police never called me to ask me questions, so it must have natural causes.

The Little House Across The Street

I couldn't really find a picture of a house that did it justice, but it looked a lot like this except it was stucco. We called them the yelling family. A single mom lived there with a bunch of other people that came and went. She had a little child that was a little older than our twins. She would take her for walks and continually scream at her. When we advertised for a nanny, she called to apply for the job. My wife recognized her voice on the phone. We didn't interview her. Anyway, there were drunken parties that spilled out on to the street. And the cops were called. Tires were slashed, There was a yelling match between our next door neighbor and one of them one night that I was sure was going to lead to a shooting. I ended up across the street on the curb getting drunk with one of them, because I didn't want them firebombing the house during the day while we were at work and the nanny was there with the kids.

During the riots and the curfews, they all came out of the house with ski masks and drove off.

In Los Angeles, the DA's office can threaten to take a property away from it's owner if it receives too many complaints to the police and bad police filings. We called every chance we could. We had a neighborhood watch group that was attended by one of the women in the house. LAPD came and told us we were lucky that the rival gangs had not realized the house was there, or we might have a shooting war.

It was about this time, I found out that LAPD Pacific division had one car on duty during the night for all of Venice. The only way you could get them to show up, was to call and say you saw a gun.

I called one night without leaving my name and address and they came across the street to knock on my door after talking to them. I was pissed. Why not just give them my name?

The parties came and went by how much the owner was threatened by the DA's office and the court. At one point I wanted to buy a crossbow and climb up on my roof and shoot a flaming arrow on their roof in the hopes of burning the house down. Never did it. My wife suggested that the little girl might get injured.

One election, the older lady that lived in the house got certified as a polling place, so if you wanted to vote you had to enter the place and tread carefully across the stained threadbare carpet, avoiding the cockroaches and punch your ballot. Don't know if those ballots actually were counted that year. Thankfully she didn't do it again. Maybe someone complained.

Noise and more noise every night. We finally sold the house and moved, mostly because we needed more room for growing kids. I drove out a couple of different nights to check out the new house at night, to make sure we weren't just moving into the same old same old. The folks across the street at the old house robbed us before we moved (see previous post). 

We moved and suddenly the nights were quiet and peaceful. You could hear crickets. And the whole thing sort of dissipated. I can remember being angry about them for at least a year.

Six months after we moved, the DA's office took possession of the house and evicted them all. The house sat, looking like this for awhile.

What they took

Don't believe them. We had just closed escrow in a new house and sold our old one and the new owners of the old one wanted the house tented. Ok. The tenting people assured us everything would be safe, exposure to the gas for just a few seconds would make an intruder violently ill. So we packed up our food and left for the weekend. Guess what. Luckily, my wife had put her jewelry box in the bottom of the dirty clothes hamper. They took our tvs, cameras, radios, the liquor in the house, the kids' piggy banks and a pair of my size 15 tennis shoes. The people living in the gang house across the street didn't come out for a week. We assumed they were sick from the gas. The insurance covered a very large tv for the new house.

I'm not sure how they got the shoes out the window. I still miss the manual 35 MM film camera they took.
I had remodeled the one car garage out back into a studio space and that's where the computer and all my books were. They didn't go back there.

The gas did effectively do in a big bougainvillea bush next to my studio, which was a shame. The neighbors loaned us a little portable tv so the kids could watch Sesame Street until we moved away.

Racing Through LA

Every year in high school, my son would play basketball with his team against King Drew Magnet. We usually lost, but it was sometimes close. Then we would run out, hop into the car and I would drive a hour across the city to get him to the high school annual jazz band performance. He would change in the back of the car while we drove. The first two years we made it in time. The last time they were putting everything away in the music room when we drove in. The teacher flunked him for not showing up, but other folks at the school convinced him to change it to a C.  I drive the city well late at night, I know all the short cuts.

This is the best song about driving LA

Marie Dead

I finished the 700 odd pages of Marie Bashkirtseff's Journals today. I realized I've been reading this for two months now. She died at 25 of TB. Her last hanging (painting) at the spring salon in Paris got her into Category 3- she was hoping for 2 (The 2s were hung at eye level.) No medal. The newspapers loved her and publishers came for permission to have etchings done after (copying) the painting so they could reprint them. There were a lot of these requests and write ups in the papers. There were few women painters then. Her diary describes how she went to the display and sat before her own painting in hopes she could hear what people said about it. It was signed M Bashkirtseff, so most believed it was a young male painter.

She was friends with Jules Bastien-Lepage who painted this

Its Joan of Arc hearing the voices for the first time.

He was about 10 years older and had received medals at the salons in Paris and she thought he painted like an angel. He had been sick for a long time (probably stomach cancer) and when Marie could no longer visit him on his death bed, he had himself carried to to her so they could talk about art. He died shortly after she did.

Sad sad sad. If you have a couple of months, its a real thing. Especially if you have daughters or are a brilliant daughter. Its started when she's about 14 or so. She knew 4 or 5 languages at twenty. She was reading War & Peace when she died.

Almost 15 years of Nanci

I was playing today at lunchtime with a couple of real good guys and thinking about the lady that wrote Gulf Coast Highway (which we are working on) and was thinking tonight that this woman has been a part of my life for a very long time (or a blink of an eye). One of the bears used to wake up very early in the morning- like 4:00 am- and I would get her up and bring her out to sit in my lap and we would watch MTV to while away the time until the rest of the world would wake up.

This was the original video that caught my eye


You get to see 15 years of my life in an instant. There are other wonderful songs to find- Youtube has them

Things Stolen From Me

The last place I had on Louisiana Avenue near the Irish Channel was a front studio apartment in an old Victorian. The two front windows were so large that you could push them all the way up and walk out on the front porch. There were screens that were two little doors on the bottom half that sort of latched. On the side wall there were these great bay windows. It used to be the front parlor of the original house. Other than a little tiny kitchen and a little tiny bathroom, that was the apartment. It was like living in a fishbowl. I had curtains you could close. The apartment windows had all been painted shut and had never been opened for years, which I immediately corrected. My homemade desk was set up facing out on the street and I would sit at night and write with all the windows open and I could go out and sit on the bench on the front porch if I wanted. Generally, I'd just draw the curtains and go to sleep.

One morning I awoke to a knock on my door and a house painter had found my wallet and ID down the street. Someone had come in through the screen door while I was asleep and took the wallet out of my pants that were draped over the chair.

I started being more careful, but it didn't stop them from coming in the windows while I was gone. Luckily I had very little and there was little to steal. I realized you could hide anything in a hollowed out book and it would never be found. I had lots of books. The books were never taken. I was robbed a couple of more times while I lived there. The last time, they took a shirt

  and some thrift store silverware because there was nothing left

Just Plain Arrogance & The Tip Of The Iceberg

I was a Freshman in college and walked into the University Bookstore one afternoon. The place was filled with Police Academy Cadets, maybe twenty or so, all in uniform. What a perfect time to shoplift a book I've been wanting. The undercover security guard who arrested me didn't have to watch the other twenty or so, just the big guy. I went back to my room and cried when no one was around. I was fined $60.00 and court costs when I pleaded guilty.$60.00 was a week's salary for me then. I decided I could no longer afford to steal things. My buddy and I had by this time ripped off half the stores in our little town. So I stopped. And I didn't even get to keep the book.

Fritz would've told me I was wise, and becoming integrated. The only thing from the books and his autobiography was the "becoming one with the all, the all just being manifestations of one's self" or something like that and the fact that he had to mention that at eighty he still masturbated every day. 

When one of the bears got caught, I was tempted to sympathize but I think I told her about the handcuffs.
It's really cheaper not to steal. The time and effort to hide your tracks and the energy to remember the alternate stories concocted is time consuming. Then there's the guilt- but more about that later.

Things I Have Stolen

I'm being encouraged by perverse friends to start an alternate bad boy site, in which I tell the really bad things I've done. I'll let you know if I do, but I thought I'd start with this kind of thing. A friend and I in high school were developing our thieving skills. Primarily because we were poor and we wanted things, but there developed a one-up-man-ship thing and we would put each other up for doing stupid things. We used to sit and drink vodka and sodas in the student union at a school (far away in a land that time forgot) at 16. There was this ship's wheel on the wall. It was from the battleship that was named after the state (far away in a land that time forgot) with a little plaque that said what it was. I was told I would never get away with it.

I borrowed a custodian's smock and strolled in with a screwdriver and took it off the wall and walked out. The hard part was returning it. I didn't want to dispose of it. The Student Union had a hotel on the other end, with a lobby and a front desk, so I sat in my car out front forever with the thing in a gunny sack, sweating like a pig, for the front desk clerk who was there by himself, to go to the bathroom and then I ran in and left it on the counter and ran like hell and sped away. I don't know if he saw me or not.

Definite felon, just my luck- it was a small town back then with small ways. I think that nobody even noticed it was gone, until it was returned. A week later it was back up in its spot. They probably thought it was a frat stunt.    

Famous Banjos of my childhood

A thousand years ago, when I was a Freshman at Indiana University, I noticed a odd thing happening the few times I got up early in the morning of a class. I had a Beginning Ed class that was at 8:30 am on Fridays. I was working full time in the evenings 3-11 and I think my days off were like Monday and Tuesday. I seldon got up before 10:00. Anyhow the the other students were migrating from the cafeteria in the Student Union to a lobby upstairs where there was a television to sip their coffee and watch a new morning show called Sesame Street.
I didn't really get into it until the three bears were into it.

Great songs, great guest artists, great corny jokes and certainly no Captain Kangaroo or Lampchop.

Special Places #??

http://davidcoupar.com/index.html  is the link for the artist.

I was in Monterey and was finishing the second draft of a novel. The plan was to finish and then move to San Francisco. A friend, Tom Kosbab, from New Orleans was up there already, so I went up on the train and spent a weekend on his couch. Saturday morning from his bay window looked out on a street something like this, but even mellower, since there was a fog across the neighborhood. This was the place for me. He gave me a funky Naworlins style tour of the city. We played the mechanical curios out at an arcade at the Cliff House and then went for tea at the Japanese Tea Garden. It was a misty cool morning and no one was around- it made you feel like the whole city was sitting in their robes in their bay windows reading their papers. We fed the little sparrows at the Tea Gardens and drove down Lombard street. His girl friend had a sister that wrote poetry and we kibitzed a little- she was like 5'2" and I was going back to Monterey probably for another year. As it turned out, I inherited his apartment with this view when I finally did make it up there. There were still traces of his oil paint on the floor where his easel had stood. One has to have a good window to write from. 

And a good light fog to make your morning mysterious. The city will always be that unbelievably gorgeous woman that didn't want me.  

Famous Banjo Companions

Blue Period with Banjo, 1980, Polaroid ER print, 24 x 20 inches, by William Wegman (American, b. 1943). Collection of Emily Todd. Photo © Rick Gardner, courtesy Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. 

We have an old lab who looks a little like this, but more gray now, who comes out to lay on carpet and listens to me practice every night from around 9:30ish to whenever I stop. Usually I have to wake her up to tell her its time to go in to bed. And she reluctantly gets up and follows me out. Don't know if she likes the music or I'm the last one up doing something and she feels morally obligated to give me support or company. I thinks its mostly because sometimes I share snacks with her. 

She used to like to howl along with harmonicas and saxophones. She doesn't sing along with me.

You would think the banjo would cheer her up as it does me, but she has always looked sad somehow.

   

Sounds Like A Good Cause

June 2010 Dear Literature Lover,
You’ve ordered books through Small Press Distribution and I want to thank you.
When you purchase a book through SPD, you do much more than simply order a book. You help support a fragile ecosystem of small literary presses committed to making great literature available; not just “bestsellers.”  The SPD family of publishers—nearly four hundred independent, mostly non-profit organizations—are not driven by a bottom line; only a love of literature and a devotion to publishing it. SPD brings that literature to you.
Please contribute to SPD—only the support of readers like you makes our mission possible.
It’s only through SPD that thousands of writers of poetry, experimental fiction, creative non-fiction, works in translation, and other kinds of literature not supported by mainstream publishing to reach readers like you.  And, like most of the publishers we support, SPD operates as a non-profit organization.  In fact, we are now the only non-profit distributor of literary books in the entire country. 
Without SPD, most of these literary books could never reach their readers.
As far as we’re concerned, until a book reaches a reader’s hands, it hasn’t been published—it’s merely been printed.  SPD plays an important role in the publishing process.  By offering national distribution to smaller publishers we ensure that these most important books can actually get to their intended readers.  SPD provides absolutely essential access to books not readily available anywhere else.  We make literary publishing possible.
You will play an active role in the publishing process through your Friend support of SPD.
Literature needs your help. Your single gift to SPD helps us bring the work of hundreds of publishers representing thousands of writers to the world. Please make your next Friend of SPD gift today.
Thank you in advance for your continued support and have a great summer!
Sincerely,

Jeffrey Lependorf, Executive Director 

Except they will not represent self-published authors or the homeless I suppose.

 

Famous Banjo s Down Under

Banjo Paterson - wrote The Man From Snowy River and Waltzing Matilda

Makes You Wonder

Dear Dan,

Thank you for allowing us to read your work and your interest in Folio.  We are always
eager to hear from writers who are serious about the business of writing;
unfortunately I do not feel that I'm the right representative for your work.

I have to be very selective of what I choose to represent and all of my
decisions are based on a frank assessment of the current needs of the
literary markets.  The fact that this work doesn't fit my narrow criteria
for representation does not mean it couldn't find a home elsewhere.  I urge
you to submit your work to other agencies or management companies that may
be more suited to this type of material.  If you have other work you wish to
submit, please feel free to query again.

Respectfully, 

Scott Hoffman and

Cicily Janus, Intern for Scott Hoffman

On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 9:08 PM, Dan McNay <mcnay@mosis.com> wrote:

Dear Cicily,

Here are the items you asked for. I hope you find them entertaining.

Dan McNay

 

They had asked to see more of the book and so I sent them more with an outline.  I wonder what the narrow criteria is. He doesn't take it if the word veranda appears in the text? He's not interested if it isn't a tell all book about oh-hum spoiled rich kids? If its not a book about a middle aged woman who's finding herself or sleeping with a younger man? I discarded this as the usual rejection, and it is actually professionally done. But now I want more. I want to see his selective list.

Is it something like:

 

1. No five syllable words.

2. Bodice ripping necessary if petticoats are included.

3. No obscure historical figures like Robert Louis Stevenson.

4. All characters must have 2010 haircuts no matter the time period (Like the old made for TV movies where the women in the revolutionary war all looked like Charlie's Angels) .

5. Must have recipes in plot.

6. Must demonstrate ability to write quickly and badly (so one can write many books)

7. Must be a pot-boiler

 

I haunt Thrift Stores and Bargain places to find cheap books and music. Do these people realize that there are thousands and thousands of used books that will never ever be read again because they fit the narrow criteria necessary to the marketplace. 

 

Remember Rex Stout? Georgette Heyer? Herman Wouk? Irving Wallace? Did anyone ever actually read all those books of Updike or Mailer?  

Famous Martyr'd Banjos

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - What type of woman waits more than 34 years for a man who committed murder?

Debra Brown's husband John A. Brown killed Dave "Stringbean" Akeman and his wife more than three decades ago. It was one of Nashville's most infamous murders.

Brown is eligible for parole.

His wife declined all television interviews until now. She spoke exclusively with NewsChannel 5 reporter Nick Beres.

Presently, two members of the state parole board voted in favor of Brown's release and two others opposed.

He earns his release if he gets two more votes in favor from two of the three remaining parole board members.

"Neither one of us wants to make excuses for that heinous act. Neither one of us want to do that. We don't shrug off the fact that the public grieves," she said.

Thirty-four years ago, her then fiancé came home late. When she asked why he told her he'd killed the "Hee Haw" star and his wife, Estelle Akeman during a botched robbery.

"And I looked at him and said,' How could you do something like that?'" she said.

Brown was convicted and sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole. She married him anyway.

When asked why she waited more than 34 years for Brown, she replied, "Well, because I love him. I made a commitment. I made a promise and I kept it."

Brown works at Cornerstone Church in Madison. In her in her office, surrounded by items made by her husband in prison, she looks for news of his possible parole.

Brown's recent parole hearing grabbed headlines. Those against his release have taken up petitions.

Brown agreed to an exclusive interview not to challenge them.

"I'm not insensitive to the way they feel. I feel the same way. It was wrong, and John's been punished," she said.

"He killed those two people. Why should he be given parole?" Beres said.

"There's another side to John Brown and I want people to see that," she said.

As she thumbs through photographs, reminders of a marriage shared with a man she rarely saw, she said he changed in prison. She said he turned to God and started helping others and staying out of trouble.

But the murders cannot be forgotten.

"The animosity of the public is still very strong. I don't blame them for that," she said.

She knows he can never replace the lost lives. Her 57-year-old husband now can only hope for parole.

"He can never earn the right. Mercy and grace are not earned, it's given. All we can ask is for mercy and grace."

She knows the chances are slim for parole, but if her husband is released, he will join her at the church.

Senior Pastor Maury Davis said he will provide John Brown with a job.

The parole board's decision is expected shortly. Four of the seven board members have voted and it's dead-locked at two.

Brown needs two more votes in favor before he's released.

Brown and his cousin, Marvin Brown were convicted for the double murder. Marvin Brown died in prison.

Dave "Stringbean" Akeman (left) and John Brown

Brown's wife, Debra Brown